Friday night, late night shift at work and decided to meet up with a friend for a cup of coffee at a near by coffee place. European style ambience, with books, the air filled with the aroma of green teas and unlimited versions of coffee. It's always the first human reaction when a person walks in and all eyes point in one direction to see who's the new customer. My friend and I scan the place, well the first thing was all the eyes staring at us and vice versa, and the odd moment when you have to look away and get busy doing what you came in to do at the first place and that is COFFEE, and then the second mission is to grab whatever chair you could find and confirm your spot before the next intruder grabs it. Don't we all react to how we are being perceived at the moment? So here we are chit chatting, while every now and then your eyes dart at people coming and going, a girl stuck on her kindle with no eye contact whatsoever, and there was a man who was making rather too much eye contact and there goes my signals of ignorance and I have no intention of throwing a smile back, on the other side a group of people engaged in perhaps a very important discussion, loners with their laptops and study books, a college student with her ipad. My friend came up with an idea to approach strangers and just ask them something stupid or maybe do a some sort of a candid show! My reaction to my friend's suggestion was a chokeful of coffee with intense coughing to regain my composure, and then my reaction "NO WAY, ARE YOU FOR REAL? "
And I tell you, he was FOR REAL.... Well the idea was postponed until the next time, in the meantime, it kept me thinking, why is it so hard to approcach people or why do we build defense mechanism when being approached? Are we really living in the world of constant doubts and dangers, or it's the way we have woven ourselves in an intricate set of social norms and rules? As a blogger and aspiring photographer, I have an observing eye, and I love that. It helps me learn and understand different social norms and why people do what they do but the question is what are people going to do? As people, we are approached in different circumstances all the time whether you are grocery shopping, filling up gas or just having coffee and the question I always have on my mind while being aproached is "what is the fine line between being rude and just ignoring to being polite and responding? "
It's always a hard one, because we are living in a world full of doubts of the other, there is no specified law or book or system to prevent you from tricky situations but sometimes in doing so we also end up loosing a good moment of conversations with people. And if you do decide to interact and the conversation turns out to be pretty good with a total stranger, do we later feel that we spoke a little too much about ourselves, after all he/she was just a stranger? Normally strangers quickly glance at each other and then look away, we demonstrate that we recognize the other person's presence, are not
seeking an interaction, but incase we chose to interact, what tricks do our minds play? I grew up interacting on all occassions and everywhere and anywhere, be it a resort, a customer, an acquintance, while flying, airpoirts, but those experiences didnt always turn out to be pleasant, as I was risking a lot of behavioral pattern for the other person to evaluate, in short it's revealing too much of yourself in terms of openess, shyness, introvert, extrovert or just like Georg Simmels
“blasé attitude” theory, of revealing our detachment from the world, display the
impersonal nature of our societies and are indicative of the
over-stimulation of crowds. Interaction with strangers is a very touchy thing to
do. Eye contact, and the "head nod" are the most
typical ways of communicating with other people nowadays. It's the feeling of uncertainty that fill up the gaps. People emerge as a set of characteristics and as a perceiver we are obliged to further investigate the norms such as, what is he wearing, does he look civilized or shabby, what car is he driving, what's his body language- calm or edgy, a trouble maker or peace maker, does he look groomed, a man with a mission in life or just some random punk?
I guess somewhere in our minds we are looking for a simple description in a world of complex phenomena.
